Wednesday, November 02, 2005

No More Reaching Across The Damn Aisle: Reason Number 151

People sometimes ask me why I'm so darned uncompromising to conservatives and neo-cons and why I no longer reach "...across the damn aisle" to Republicans. Here's another in a lengthy series of reasons.On the very day (Friday) when we saw a criminal indictment handed down to one of the White House's most senior staff members, who breached our country's security in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, leading conservative blog, PoliPundit, had a post called simply "Stupid, Stupid, Stupid!"

Did the writer complain of how stupid it was of the Bush White House to violate the public trust and endanger our national security by exposing intelligence assets?

No. Read on.

Almost two years ago, when Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed as the special prosecutor, I wrote:

"The decision by John Ashcroft to recuse himself and turn over the Wilson/Plame investigation to a special counsel is stupid, stupid, stupid! I’d always thought the whole Wilson/Plame thing would amount to a big ball of nothing; but Washington Republicans seem determined to prove me wrong by giving Democrats everything they want.

"This is just another illustration that Republicans are hopeless at using the wheels of power in Washington to perpetuate their grip. When you control the executive and legislative branches, what possible reason do you have for ceding control of politically sensitive investigations to 'neutral' investigators?"

As a result of that manifest stupidity, Scooter Libby will be indicted today.

So the heinous stuff these people pull isn't the issue with this conservative – it's that the Republicans were "stupid" enough to actually allow for an impartial investigation that got to the truth. And this is a conservative web-rag that attracts almost 25,000 readers a day.

Political writer Bob Geiger is the award-winning author of the Yellow Dog Blog and BobGeiger.com and specializes in coverage of the U.S. Senate. He won the 2005 Weblog Awards prize for Best New Blog and was a finalist in the Koufax Awards in 2005 for his column "I Know This Little Boy in New Orleans."

He is the coauthor of The Real McCain and his work has appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the New York Journal News. A contributing writer to The Huffington Post and Alternet, Bob also makes appearances to comment on Senate activity on many popular radio programs.